Better Webcam Support Continued

Summary

The Better Webcam support feature for F-10 and F-12 has added support for many webcams, but there still are models which are unsupported the goal of this feature is to get even more webcams supported out of the box, with a special focus on so called
dual mode camera's for this release.

Owner

Name: Hans de Goede

Email: hdegoede redhat com

Current status

Detailed Description

The Better Webcam support feature for F-10 has done much of the groundwork needed for properly supporting webcams in Linux. We now
have a library (libv4l) for decompressing various proprietary video formats in userspace, and almost all webcam using applications have been patched to use this library.

This third push for better webcam contains of 4 pieces:

Lots of testing and bugfixing / improving of existing in kernel drivers. I need access to cams for this! As you can see in the matrix below I already have quite a few of them, most of which were bought from my own money especially for this. If you have old cams to donate please contact me!

Try to make the ever growing list of upside down mounted laptop webcams as complete as possible, so people will not have any upside down issues out of the box.

Clean up existing out of tree drivers, moving the decompression to libv4l where needed and merge them into the mainline, specifically the following ones:

stv0680 dual mode camera bridge (done as of 2.6.33rc2)

w996Xcf dual mode camera bridge (done as of 2.6.33rc2)

ovfx2 webcam bridge (done as of 2.6.33rc2)

Help upstream and specifically Theodore Kilgore from gphoto2 to get kernel drivers supporting the streaming mode of dual mode cameras (still cams which can act as webcams) into the mainline kernel, specifically for the following chipsets:

mr97310a (done as of 2.6.33rc2)

sn9c2028 (wip)

Benefit to Fedora

Out of the box working hardware makes for happy end users and good reviews.

Scope

This may require temporarily carrying kernel patches if drivers are clearly moving upstream, but not there yet in time for release.

This requires updating libv4l to a version which contains an up2date upside down table and can decompress any formats produced by
new drivers.